OGSA Roadmap Editors Call
June 7, 2006

Attendees:
Chris Jordan, Patricia Kovatch (SDSC)
Dona Dickinson (NGC)
Mike Behrens (R2AD)

Note taker: Chris Jordan

The meeting consisted primarily of an overview of proposed organizational/preparational tasks, listed below with responsible parties

Getting Contact Information for all groups (Chris will get from Hiro, Dona will maintain future list)

Getting new document list for inclusion in next Roadmap document (Chris will discuss with Hiro, Jem, and OGSA-WG)

Chris feels that section 1 needs to be rewritten to provide a more general motivation, as the current version focuses on follow-on activities to the release of the OGSA 1.0 Architecture document. One proposed addition/replacement for this section is a more detailed history of the GGF/OGSA efforts, and their relationship to other ongoing Grid Services standards work. (Chris has agreed to begin work on this)

Chris: The areas of section 2 regarding "OGSA process and compliance", and the ability of implementations to claim various levels of OGSA-conformance seems to need re-examination or clarification - It is not clear to the editing team how a "compliance test" for some of the involved standards documents would be implemented, and the number of levels of conformance seems overly complex. It is also not clear how the various levels relate to the ability of implementations to interoperate. Also need clarification on OGSA process discussion. (It was suggested that the process and compliance material might be best placed in a related but separate document. This topic has been deferred for later discussion, ideally with Hiro, Jem, and possibly the entire group)

All participants agreed that the document should include at least a more detailed summary of lower-level standards which OGSA and related documents build upon or assume some implementation of (I.E. XML, Schemas, WSDL, WSRF, etc), without including detailed tracking information for each of these standards.
(Mike Behrens will work on gathering status and relationship information for Web services standards. The OGSA community is actively encouraged to submit individual visions of the software/standards stack)

Mike Behrens suggested that it would be helpful to include a new section on the future vision of OGSA and how that fits within the overall grid computing landscape. What documents have been proposed, and what are needed?

The above topic relates to Gap Analysis, a topic which was deferred for later discussion, once we have a better sense of how the new version of the document will take shape.

Open Items:

The overall vision for the roadmap, and the new documents to be included, probably need to be discussed in an official forum - Chris will propose to Hiro either a session at the OGSA F2F in July, or a discussion on one of the weekly conference calls, to try and get some feedback from the group on both topics.

We still need to reformat the data in the spreadsheet into a relational database or other, more manageable form - it was generally agreed that the current status spreadsheet is frightening, at best. We may need a shared web-space backended by a relational database to manage both the project and the technical data involved. it is possible that R2AD may be able to host this space, if GridForge is determined to be inadequate to the needs of the project.

The final item is the question of whether a call should be held this wednesday - Chris will be on travel next week, so will be available this week, then unavailable  until the last week of june. If Hiro and Jem are available to discuss some of the open items and topics listed above, I believe a call could be useful. Otherwise, I propose we stick to e-mail and schedule the next call for Wednesday, June 28th.

Thanks to all the participants. Comments and questions are welcome.